A Role To Die For

A Juicy Part Helps Nicole Kidman Escape Her Image As Tom Cruise's Wife.

October 5, 1995|By BOB STRAUSS Los Angeles Daily News

LOS ANGELES - — Nicole Kidman was not prepared to kill for the lead role in To Die For. But she wanted it almost as badly as the film's homicidal heroine, Suzanne Stone, wants to be a television star.

"This is the first role that I've really had that's had some complexity to it," says the Australian actress who, until now, has been best-known as Tom Cruise's wife and for glamour roles in the likes of Batman Forever and Far and Away. "I was able to really get my teeth into this. It was a joy.

Suzanne is a small-town beauty whose dreams of media stardom drive her to workaholic and murderous excess. Her ambitions go far beyond her weather reporting job at a cable-access station in Little Hope, N.H. When her regular-guy husband, Larry (Matt Dillon), suggests that her aspirations are unrealistic, Suzanne's sociopathic mind interprets it as a threat. She then sets out to convince a trio of dazed teen-agers to rub Larry out of her way.

After reading Buck Henry's screen adaptation of Joyce Maynard's novel, Kidman figured she would face stiff competition for the role. But it actually came more easily than she'd expected.

"It was first offered to another actress who didn't want to do it, but it wasn't offered to me," Kidman recalls. "I then called [director) Gus Van Sant and asked, `Will you let me do this movie, please?' and he cast me over the phone.

"It's black comedy, which is hard to do, so you have to really work on it and understand it," Kidman continues. "Then, within that, you have to base it in a reality, make it completely believable to yourself so you're not making any judgment on the character. Otherwise, you can get into a caricature. So I had to love her, and I still think she's kind of an extraordinary Barbie doll gone wrong."

Van Sant, who has been both acclaimed (Drugstore Cowboy) and reviled (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) for his independent films about complicated social outlaws, had his own reasons for hiring Kidman to star in his first Hollywood studio production.

"I partly liked that Nicole wasn't an extremely recognizable female lead," Van Sant says. "She's played a lot of different things in her past. Also, her extreme interest in playing the part was attractive."

Producer Laura Ziskin, whose films have ranged from the questionable Cinderella fantasy Pretty Woman to the unsuccessful critique of television Hero, found Kidman perfect for To Die For's beautiful media monster.

"I'd seen wonderful work from her before, but I've never seen anything like this," Ziskin says. "A talented actor can sometimes have an instinct about what they can do. I felt comfortable because Nicole was so confident."

That was key for Ziskin, who very much wanted To Die For's acrid media satire to work.

"Broadcast media is the most powerful institution in the history of civilization," Ziskin observes. "It defines, in American culture, our values. And while I'm no advocate of censorship, I think that's tragic and really, really scary. Hopefully, the movie is a cautionary tale about that."

Kidman put 3 1/2 months of preparation into the job. That included checking herself into a Santa Barbara hotel where she watched TV for three days straight. "It created a very hypnotic effect, but it became so compelling," she says. "It's a situation where you can get so absorbed in it that it really does become a completely different world."

A world she was able to understand Suzanne's vulnerability to.

"Here's a woman who's ambitious, but who ends up going down the wrong track," Kidman says. "There are a lot of things in the movie that show you Suzanne is a victim. Of television, certainly. She grew up in a generation that just watched television, and had her morals dictated by TV's moral code. Then, within that, she's a woman who has to use whatever she has to get where she wants to get."

Following the blueprint of Henry's screenplay, Van Sant tells much of the film via videotaped interviews, televised talk shows and flashbacks after Larry's murder.

"There's a lot of fun being poked at the media in all sorts of different ways," the director says. "I use it to question the whole standard of the news commentator business. Because of the variety of channels that have exploded in the last 10 years, there has been a proliferation of these jobs. How qualified or unqualified are the people who get them? Which ones rise to the top?

"Suzanne's an insane maniac, and that's the job she wants. And these are the people telling the rest of us what to think."

Kidman's latest career move can hardly be called crazy. She's starring in the feature adaptation of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady for The Piano director Jane Campion.

That, along with her universally praised work in To Die For, opening Friday in South Florida, should finally define Kidman's own media image as an actress to be reckoned with.

"I don't think that being married to somebody you're in love with is a burden," says Kidman, who has been dismissed in some quarters as more of a superstar's wife than an actress. "In the sense of being judged in a certain way, yeah, I was put into a particular mold. But To Die For is starting to change that, and that's great. For me, it's a relief."